Recently, many people take photographs of events or daily life with their smartphones according to the rapid spread of smartphones.
However, in general, printers have been installed and used in offices or at home and most of the printers are monochrome printers. Even though people have color printers in their offices or at home, it is not possible to print photographs of high quality with the color printers. Therefore, in order to print the photographs taken by smartphones, the photographs have to be outputted in professional photo printing studios.
For this reason, a portable sublimation printer capable of communicating with a portable smartphone wirelessly or through a wire and instantly printing the photographs taken by the smartphone with high quality has been gradually developed and diffused.
A sublimation printer includes a thermal recording head for sequentially printing a printing paper with three colors of yellow Y, magenta M and cyan C, thereby recording the images of photographs on the printing paper with high quality.
Herein, the up/down operations of a paper pickup roller for moving the printing paper and the up/down operations of a platen roller for bringing the printing paper into contact with the thermal recording head have to be carried out, wherein the paper pickup roller and the platen roller operate in association with the operations of each other.
Therefore, a prior art cam device for driving the up/down operations of the paper pickup roller and the up/down operations of the platen roller has a disadvantage that the configuration of the cam device for controlling the up/down operations of the paper pickup roller and the platen roller by using a cam is much complicated such that the thickness of a portable printer becomes thick and the weight thereof becomes increased.
There has been suggested a “printer using a roll type recording medium” in Korean Patent Application No. 10-2005-77076 in order to solve the problem in the prior art. However, this prior art has still disadvantages that it is difficult to form a thin printer since a motor and a cam device are provided to the side surfaces of a printer, and a cam pin is likely to be bent, generating defects, since the function of cutting a paper and the function of moving a platen roller in the up/down directions are carried out by the single cam pin.